Best 70 quotes in «dysfunctional family quotes» category

i can't tell if my mother is terrified or in love with my father it all looks the same i flinch when you touch me i fear it is him

If I, as a child, claim that something awful has happened—that someone has done something terrible to me—and everyone around me acts as if nothing is the matter, then either I must be crazy, or all of them are. And when you’re a kid and your life depends on all these people, there is no choice: of course, I must be crazy.

If a child’s emotional and intellectual freedom is restricted, their development and well-being suffer, which leads to complex problems in later life. Deprivation of thought and emotion results in an irrationality of cognition, feeling, and communication.

I was never allowed to have any pets. Sometimes I think a puppy might have changed everything.

In Ireland we have the phenomenon known as a "Spoiled Priest." Unlike a spoiled child, this does not refer to a Priest throwing a temper tantrum.

Ignoring a baby’s cries without addressing their needs can permanently harm them. All of these failures may lead a child to have post-traumatic stress disorder or any of the forms of panic disorder in their adulthood.

I’m an aid worker. I’ve been helping South Sudanese people who’ve returned to their villages after being displaced by the civil war prepare for the rainy season, which, by all accounts, is going to suck elephant dicks this year.

Incest does not occur in a vacuum... Needless to say, incest is not a function of a healthy home. It is important to note that it is not known how much of the traumatic stress reaction or emotional disturbance is caused by the sexual act of incest and how much is caused by the unhealthy, emotionally deprived, neglect-filled home environment that fosters incestuous activity.

My mom called Grandma today and told her we would no longer be attending family parties. My mom told her we have had enough of being blamed for something Brian did and everyone brushing it off like it was no big deal.

Meanwhile, infants and small children are exceptionally authentic beings because their emotional reactions and their thoughts are raw and honest. If they are happy, they smile, giggle, exclaim in pure joy, and feel excited, motivated, curious, and creative. If they are hurt, they cry, disengage, get angry, seek help and protection, and feel betrayed, sad, scared, lonely, and helpless. They don’t hide behind a mask.

One needn't stop dysfunction; just evince and reflect.

My sister only has one side of the story but she is sure that she knows the whole story because that is how the dysfunctional system works. We don’t question everyone or even consider that there may be another side to the story but instead automatically believe the one who has the most power in the relationship.

One of the most common corruptions of childrearing remains the controlling caregiver’s propensity to shape the child into an object aligned with the caregiver’s own unprocessed trauma. Controlling caregivers have a variety of methods at their disposal to accomplish this, including such “civilized” approaches as manipulating, conditionally loving, withdrawing attention, threatening, isolating, shaming, guilt-tripping, humiliating, and withdrawing resources.

Only when a child’s authenticity is threatened do they develop unhealthy behaviors, distorted reality perceptions, and emotional difficulties. When you force a child to do what they don’t want to do, feel what they don’t feel, and think what they don’t think, their authentic self becomes damaged.

She was so upset about a blog that maybe a total of six people read yet had no compassion for her granddaughters who had suffered the physical and emotional pains of sexual abuse and whose lives were changed forever. The two cannot even be compared, yet when someone is in denial about what happened, they cannot perceive what is true. It seemed too hard for her to let her mind go there and believe her grandson could do such terrible things.

Sexual abuse is also a secret crime, one that usually has no witness. Shame and secrecy keep a child from talking to siblings about the abuse, even if all the children in a family are being sexually assaulted. In contrast, if a child is physically or emotionally abused, the abuse is likely to occur in front of the other children in the family, at least some of the time. The physical and emotional abuse becomes part of the family's explicit history. Sexual abuse does not.

Perhaps nothing so accurately characterizes dysfunctional families as denial.

Perhaps nothing so accurately characterizes dysfunctional families as denial. The denial forces members to keep believing the myths and vital lies in spite of the facts, or to keep expecting that the same behaviors will have different outcomes. Dad's not an alcoholic because he never drinks in the morning, in spite of the fact that he's drunk every night.

...the child cries because they need something. If the child had the ability to take care of the problem themselves, they wouldn’t cry. And if their crying is ignored, they start to feel helpless and frustrated because they can’t get what they need. They may even fear abandonment—or feel that their life is in danger because no one is coming to help them. Failing to meet a crying child’s needs also teaches the child that their needs and feelings are unimportant and even dangerous, and that they are bad and unworthy of love.

The fetus is biochemically connected to the mother, and her external, internal, physical, and mental health affect the overall development of the fetus. Stress and depression during pregnancy have been proven to have long-term and even permanent effects on the offspring. Such effects include a vulnerability to chronic anxiety, elevated fear, propensity to addictions, and poor impulse control.

The child of a controlling caregiver believes that there are always winners and losers in life, and that the winners have all the power and the losers must neglect their own senses, needs, and wants. The result is that they gain a deformed and inaccurate picture of the world—the only world they know.

..[The] disclosure of the incest secret initiates a profound crisis for the family usually...the abuse has been going on for a number of years and has become an integral part of family life. Disclosure disrupts whatever fragile equilibrium has been maintained, jeopardizes the functioning of all family members, increases the likelihood of violent and desperate behavior, and places everyone, but particularly the daughter, at risk for retaliation.

The fear of abandonment forced me to comply as a child, but I’m not forced to comply anymore. The key people in my life did reject me for telling the truth about my abuse, but I’m not alone. Even if the consequence for telling the truth is rejection from everyone I know, that’s not the same death threat that it was when I was a child. I’m a self-sufficient adult and abandonment no longer means the end of my life.

To heal from child sexual abuse you must believe that you were a victim, that the abuse really did take place. This is often difficult for survivors. When you’ve spent your life denying the reality of your abuse, when you don’t want it to be true, or when your family repeatedly calls you crazy or a liar, it can be hard to remain firm in the knowledge that you were abused.

The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the 1990s and early 1980s was the dominant understanding of professionals characterised the sex abuser as a pathetic person who had been denied sex and warmth by his wife, who in turn denied warmth to her daughters. Out of this dysfunctional triad grew the far-too-cosy incest dyad. Simply diagnosed, relying on the signs: alcoholic father, cold distant mother, provocative daughter. Simply resolved, because everyone would want to stop, to return to the functioning family where mum and dad had sex and daughter concentrated on her exams. Professionals really believed for a while that sex offenders would want to stop what they were doing. They thought if abuse were decriminalised, abusers would seek help. The survivors knew different. P5

There is an intergenerational reoccurrence rate of 30% in incest.

The widower glanced at her wedding ring and contemplated a solitary life with his son, but then the mayhem of his marital allegiance resurfaced, and he decided not to betray her.

Though all the daughters eventually succeeded in escaping from their families, they felt, even at this time of the interview (while in their 20s and 30s) that they would never be safe with their fathers, and that they would have to defend themselves as long as their fathers lived.

Thus polyvictimization or complex trauma are "developmentally adverse interpersonal traumas" (Ford, 2005) because they place the victim at risk not only for recurrent stress and psychophysiological arousal (e.g., PTSD, other anxiety disorders, depression) but also for interruptions and breakdowns in healthy psychobiological, psychological, and social development. Complex trauma not only involves shock, fear, terror, or powerlessness (either short or long term) but also, more fundamentally, constitutes a violation of the immature self and the challenge to the development of a positive and secure self, as major psychic energy is directed toward survival and defense rather than toward learning and personal development (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). Moreover, it may influence the brain's very development, structure, and functioning in both the short and long term (Lanius et al., 2010; Schore, 2009). Complex trauma often forces the child victim to substitute automatic survival tactics for adaptive self-regulation, starting at the most basic level of physical reactions (e.g., intense states of hyperarousal/agitation or hypoarousal/immobility) and behavioral (e.g., aggressive or passive/avoidant responses) that can become so automatic and habitual that the child's emotional and cognitive development are derailed or distorted. What is more, self-integrity is profoundly shaken, as the child victim incorporates the "lessons of abuse" into a view of him or herself as bad, inadequate, disgusting, contaminated and deserving of mistreatment and neglect. Such misattributions and related schema about self and others are some of the most common and robust cognitive and assumptive consequences of chronic childhood abuse (as well as other forms of interpersonal trauma) and are especially debilitating to healthy development and relationships (Cole & Putnam, 1992; McCann & Pearlman, 1992). Because the violation occurs in an interpersonal context that carries profound significance for personal development, relationships become suspect and a source of threat and fear rather than of safety and nurturance. In vulnerable children, complex trauma causes compromised attachment security, self-integrity and ultimately self-regulation. Thus it constitutes a threat not only to physical but also to psychological survival - to the development of the self and the capacity to regulate emotions (Arnold & Fisch, 2011). For example, emotional abuse by an adult caregiver that involves systematic disparagement, blame and shame of a child ("You worthless piece of s-t"; "You shouldn't have been born"; "You are the source of all of my problems"; "I should have aborted you"; "If you don't like what I tell you, you can go hang yourself") but does not involve sexual or physical violation or life threat is nevertheless psychologically damaging. Such bullying and antipathy on the part of a primary caregiver or other family members, in addition to maltreatment and role reversals that are found in many dysfunctional families, lead to severe psychobiological dysregulation and reactivity (Teicher, Samson, Polcari, & McGreenery, 2006).

When I thought about how much time I had already put into a relationship without reciprocation from the other person and how I spent YEARS recovering and trying to recover from the damage of her verbal, emotional and physical abuse and neglect, I realized that I was the only one trying and I wasn’t the problem! That understanding changed everything!

Too many Americans are spurred to achieve, rather than to attach.

We are in the era of dysfunctional relationships.

We don't get to choose our family, but we can choose our friends. With courage, we can weed out narcissistic people. We can focus on those who do appreciate us, love us, and treat us with respect.

When I was your age, I would go to plays all the time, just sit in the darkness and try to take it all in inside me. Contain everything in some corner of my heart so that when I had my shot, it could all come pouring out - all the lights and moments and colour.

You have the right to set ground rules. This means deciding if, when, and how you want to see the people in your family. Many survivors feel that if they open up the channels at all, they have to open them up all the way. When you were a child you had two options—to trust or not to trust. Your options are broader now.

You cannot fix people who will not take feedback, because from their perspective, they do not have a problem.

You can tell a lot about a person's childhood by whether or not they like Christmas.

You do not have to come from healthy to create healthy.

You don’t want to threaten me sis.

Dysfunctional families have sired a number of pretty good actors.

You never turn away family, no matter how f***ed up they are.

You were tossed away like a pair of beautiful, brand new shoes that did not quite fit.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I don't know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart.

If you grew up in a dysfunctional family, then there is really no hope for you to have a good relationship. That is another myth that we have to throw off, so that we can get into what I call Reality.

I came from an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, full of abuse and alcoholism. And eventually everyone within the family had committed suicide.

I come from a dysfunctional family, so my views of parents and parenting used to be highly mixed.

It is a family; it's a slightly dysfunctional family, but it's also very close and warm and loving family.

I grew up in a dysfunctional family.

Abusive parents have inappropriate expectations of their children, with a reversal of dependence needs. Parents treat an abused child as if the child were older than the parents. A parent often turns to the child for reassurance, nurturing, comfort, and protection and expects a loving response.